We’re very excited to announce several great improvements to our Facebook application that are available as of today. These product updates include enhancements to help drive quicker resolution, support for single sign-on, and improvements to the user experience.

Drive Quicker Resolution by Collecting Additional Data

Get Satisfaction has always been designed to help drive resolution and outcomes (rather than just ongoing discussion). With this new release, we’ve added several features to help you and your customers get to good outcomes as quickly as possible.

End-User Product Selection: For multi-product communities (i.e. ones that are supporting multiple distinct products) that have a single Facebook brand page, your customers can now get more targeted support in the Facebook app. Now, when your customers view your Facebook app, they’ll be prompted to select the product they use right as they’re asking their question. We’ll filter the search results based on that product, providing them with more relevant results. This is a great addition to an existing feature that allows you to filter the entire app by a single product, which is great for communities that have a different fan page for each of their products. You can even specify the prompt presented to users when they select the product, so you can keep everything in-brand.

Configurable Prompt for Additional Data: It’s really common to need to clarify questions and problems that users report in your community. Unfortunately, as a community manager, you probably find yourself asking the same clarifying questions on almost every post. For instance, “what version are you on?” or “what browser and operating system are you using?” are common clarifying questions. Now, you can configure a single question that we’ll prompt end-users with as they’re posting a new topic. The answer to the question will be added as a public tag on the topic when it’s posted.

Private Feedback: Not all your customers are comfortable posting their feedback publicly in the community. But you still want to hear from them! That’s why we’ve added Private Feedback to our Facebook app. You can now give customers an option when composing their feedback to submit their post directly to you via email instead of in the community. We’ll prompt them for their name and email address and will package up the topic into an email that’s sent to your community’s configured feedback email address. This is a great compliment to our Private Feedback feature in our Engage widgets.

Single Sign-On Support

If you have a community that requires users to login using single sign-on (SSO) to your site, you’ll be happy to hear that we’ve added support for SSO using FastPass to the Facebook app. If you have a FastPass restricted community, you can now install our Facebook app on your fan page and direct your customers to ask their questions there (instead of on your wall).

Improved User Experience

Our new Facebook app was built from scratch so that we could better ensure a consistent, reliable experience for your customers. In addition to some of the great feature additions above, we also took the opportunity to improve the user experience as well — both on the back-end and front-end.

Improved Performance: The new Facebook app now runs entirely on Get Satisfaction’s own platform, built on top of the same API’s that run our Engage widgets. The result is a faster experience for your customers and one that has minimal data latency. The previous version of our app took up to an hour (or more) for activity in the community to be reflected in the Facebook app. Updates in the community are now reflected in the Facebook app immediately.

Shares and Topics Displayed in Facebook: We’ve changed the application so that almost all actions keep your users in the context of Facebook rather than linking them out to the web version of your community. Your users can infinitely page through topics in the community. They can view community announcements and other topics in the app itself. And when they share content to their walls, the shared link takes the user’s friends to the Facebook app and automatically opens the appropriate topic in an overlay.

Visual Design and Flow Changes: We’ve made several changes from a visual design and flow perspective that should make your fans feel even more at home in your community. We’ve updated the look-and-feel of the app to be more consistent with Facebook’s current design. We’ve updated the topic posting flow to allow users to preview their topic before submitting it. And we’ve added success messages after a user submits a post to let them know what to expect next.

Easier Administration: You’ll now see that the installation and configuration process is consolidated within the admin section of your community, giving you a single place to go when you need to make updates. Admins can see a list of all the fan pages they’ve installed the app to and can edit the configuration for each.

Get Started Today!

If you’re new to Get Satisfaction or haven’t installed our Facebook application yet, now’s a great time to get started. You can be up-and-running with the Facebook app within minutes. If you’re on a supported plan, simply click on Facebook in the left nav of your community’s admin section. You’ll need to login as the admin of your fan page, grant access, and we’ll install the app for you. You’ll then be able to customize the app to meet your community’s needs.

If you’re an existing customer, all you need to do is uninstall the old application (powered by Involver) and install the new one. Our community manager, Caty Kobe, put together a great step-by-step video tutorial on how to do this here.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve added support for Gravatar that allows users to more easily upload an avatar image to their Get Satisfaction profile. If you’re not familiar with Gravatar, it’s the default avatar system used for all WordPress installations, including the open source version, hosted version, and WordPress.com. In addition, Gravatars are used in many other social applications across the web, including StackOverflow, Disqus, and GitHub. With millions of avatar images being served up per day by Gravatar, it made complete sense to add support for it. But it wasn’t our idea, it was yours!

Support for Gravatars was one of the most requested features in our community (with over 340 people supporting the idea). One of our engineers, Piotr Biegaj, who’s passionate about responding to feedback from our community, decided to implement support for Gravatars on a hack-day a few weeks back.

Using your Gravatar with just one click

Upload your Gravatar with one click

When users edit their profile now, they will see an additional action they can take to upload a photo using their Gravatar. Next to their profile image, there is now a link that says “use my Gravatar”. When the user clicks on the link, we’ll check to see if there is a Gravatar image associated with the user’s primary email address. If so, we’ll download their Gravatar automatically. If not, we’ll display a message letting them know that they should upload their avatar image manually instead.

We’re happy to announce that we just released a great enhancement for our standard plans, including Start, Grow, and Connect, that allows them to create Engage widgets targeted based on one or more products in their community.

With this new capability, if you’re a company that supports multiple products or features in your community, you can now offer a more targeted community experience on your website, in your product, or in any web-based experience you have for your customers. The product filtering feature allows you to filter all content in the Engage widgets by one or more products that you’ve created in your community. In addition, all new topics that get posted to the community from that widget will automatically be tagged with the products you specify. Enterprise plans have benefited from this feature since we first launched Engage back in May, so we’re excited to extend this to all of our paid plans.

Here are three examples of how you can use a product specific Engage widget:

1. Answer common product questions in a shopping cart flow
If your customers have specific questions about a product they’re evaluating, they can get answers from the community right in the shopping cart flow. You can create a topic search or feedback widget filtered by that product that will allow users to ask their questions without interrupting the purchase flow. The content returned by the widget will all be relevant because it will be scoped to just the product they’re evaluating.

2. Publish praise on your marketing website
Leverage all the great compliments your advocates are giving your products by publishing them on your website. For instance, you can create a topic list widget filtered by a particular product that displays recent praise about that product. Publish the widget on your marketing site’s product detail page to always have fresh word-of-mouth content displayed right as prospects are forming an opinion about your product.

3. Collect and surface feedback inside your web-based products
If you have one or more web-based products, you can include a widget that allows you to collect feedback from directly within your user experience. You can surface commonly asked questions where they’re needed the most — when users are interacting with your application. For instance, if you have contextual help in an admin screen or on a particularly tricky feature of your product, you can include a topic list widget that displays questions only about that particular feature.

Get Started Today! Configuration’s a Snap.
As you configure your Engage widgets, you’ll now see an additional setting under the Topic filtering options section titled Choose products and services to filter content by. You can choose one or more products to filter the widget by. All content displayed in the widget, including any topic lists or search results, will be filtered based on the selected products and services. Only topics that have these products and services will be displayed. In addition, new topics that are posted from that particular widget will automatically be tagged with those products and services.

We’re happy to announce that you can now setup communities to engage in productive conversations with your customers in three new languages — Danish, Finnish, and Norwegian!

For plans that include language support, you can now choose one of these new languages when configuring your community. After purchasing your community, simply go into the Basic Information settings under Community Details in your Admin section to select the language. All of the end-user facing prompts and labels displayed in your community will appear in the selected language.

These three new Scandinavian languages are added to the existing eight languages we already support: Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

Get Satisfaction is happy to announce an update to the Topics API endpoint. With this update topic moderation status and social source data is returned by the API.

Topic Moderation

Moderation & Curation Actions

Community Managers are encouraged to regularly perform moderation and curation in their community to keep the content relevant and findable, and for overall organization and tidiness in the community. Check the Community Resource Guide for best practices on when to perform moderation actions.

The GET Topics API response now returns Topic Archived, Removed, and Spam statuses in addition to the Closed status that it already returned. Each status returns true or false based on the moderation actions performed on the topic.

Example Topic response (JSON):

Social Media Source

Using the Get Satisfaction Hootsuite integration when a Tweet or a Facebook post is shared in the Community as a topic, the social source reference to the original content is also stored with the topic. By adding an additional parameter (?social_source=true) to the GET Topics call following social source details are returned:

name: Name of the Social site (ex: Twitter, Facebook, etc),

user: Creator of the original post on the social site

created_at: When the original post was created

url: and a link to the original content is returned with the topic details.